"You use me _too_ cruelly," she said; "I do not deserve this silent scorn! I have wronged myself by giving way to emotions for which you but mock and despise me!"
He started--were not her words true? Had he not been unjust in his grief?
"Leonora," said he, abruptly, "hear me! From my earliest youth--ever since remembrance avails me to recall events--rash, impetuous feeling (my inheritance from a long line of hot-headed ancestors) made me in every feeling extreme and violent. I rushed to my studies as to a conflict with a foe, and rested not till I had conquered every difficulty. The same in pleasure, obstacles were but the stones that made the stream of life sparkle brightly in its sun, and I leaped over them, or cast them aside with an exulting sense of power. My love for _you_ concentrated all this vagrant impetuosity into one earnest and undying passion. It subdued and soothed the sinuosities of my outward nature; it checked the headlong restlessness that was before apparent in all I did, and turned all the various bubbling springs within me into one noiseless, but deep, resistless stream. It made an ocean of the rivers of my being; that ocean rose and fell, tinted with the sun's glorious beams for a brief space! Oh! how brief! and then storms arose; and now, when I know the tempest is to last forever, is it strange if I am indignant when I look on her who wrought all this misery, this fearful misery?"
He had spoken without looking up at her. He now raised his eyes, and found her again weeping bitterly.
"And do I not share that misery, with all the aggravation of a fruitless remorse? Oh, you know not," she added, her voice assuming a tone of beseeching earnestness, "the days and nights of intense anguish that dragged their slow length along, when thinking you lay beneath the deep sea (for they said your grave was there). When tears would flow, I wept for you, and mourned in silent anguish when they were refused me! You know not how stronger than a woman's that heart must be that can resist the appeal, continued day after day, when it comes from the lips of 'all, whom we believe to be in the wide world, whom we would bless.' _Words_ may be met and combated; but the mute lip and imploring eye--_they_ cannot be resisted; the tenderness that _veils_ its dearest wish for fear of grieving us; the grief unspoken, and the more bitter from concealment! Who can see this, _and in a father_, every day, every hour, every minute, and nerve their hearts to deny the relief they can bestow? But all this avails nothing; the tie is irrevocable that binds me to misery and severs us forever. For you, Zanotti, you will go forth into the world; excitement is an antidote provided for the grief of man. You will win admiration and applause; your fame as a scholar and a poet, your renown as a soldier, will secure you a high position among men, higher than your rank alone would give. You will be loved, you will love again, and _our_ hours of rapture will linger in your mind but as the recollection of a dream! I ask but a kindly remembrance and forgiveness of my unintentional sin. Farewell!"